WK5 Material culture: Identity

   Individualism and Gender

You own yourself. A rebuttable presumption exists that you know what's best for you (which you can refute by being irresponsible or criminal, leading to your individual rights being taken away by the institutions of society via due process). Individual rights are secondary to collective good. Individualism asserts that people gather together and create what we call society to serve themselves. The problem is that society itself cannot exist as a whole, it will always be in groups. Those groups help us identify ourselves. We identify ourselves with what we have in common with others. The biggest groups I'm talking about are gender and race groups. 

Some gender roles and characteristics are social construct but others are biologically supported. Examples of socially constructed gender roles are: women wear dresses and skirts, men wear trousers, women don't watch sport, men watch sport and drink beer. It is so easy to identify as one of these but also to get judged by the society for it. Gender roles are not purely cultural constructs. They have an underlying biological basis in that men tend to be on average stronger than women, for example. But we have created cultural gender roles that seem to have lives of their own.

One's personality develops and defines their gender. There is the time when personality uses the proclivities to choose and decide which things and ideas are to be selected for relating and expressing the person you are. If these are socially non-compliant, eventually you will face the social bullying and that way the people get divided. 

In conclusion, we conform to the cultural rules because we want society and culture to remain stable and whole. A healthy society enables individuals to respect the rules while at the same time expressing who they are within the confines of those rules.